The Trials of Henry Kissinger

He won the Nobel Prize for Peace, but according to some people he is a war criminal who should be put on trial. With his policies, Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, is responsible for so many casualties that the International Court of Justice would have a stiff job trying him. Kissinger has now been summoned in five different countries, but as long as the United States shirk international justice, the former statesman has little to fear. What exactly are Kissinger’s crimes? In THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER, based on a controversial book by investigative journalist Christopher Hitchens, this is elucidated in great detail. According to Hitchens, whose claim is supported by a few witnesses, Kissinger sabotaged the peace negotiations with Vietnam in 1968, so that Nixon could go on and win the presidential elections, with Kissinger as his right hand. Some years and a million and a half casualties later, the Vietnam War was finally stopped, on exactly the same conditions as formulated in the near-agreement of 1968. And there is more: 200,000 dead in East Timor, and countless victims in Chile, where the American government assisted in ousting the democratically elected Salvador Allende. Not all interviewees in THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER agree with Hitchens’s diatribe. But instead of refuting the charges, Kissinger and his followers restrict themselves to slandering the journalist.